I flinch away from her, ashamed by my deepest thoughts and inability to understand the difficult emotional terrain I’ve landed in.

“Don’t leave the Zonor,” my aunt says to me, her stare blisteringly intent. Her unexpected words pierce my soul. “That’s where you’ll find your strength,” she insists. “And your transformation. Don’t fear it, Vothendrile.”

“Our people are wrong to want to wall off the West,” I blurt out to her. To this renegade aunt of mine who is often tactlessly blunt, caustically revolutionary, and seems to regularly position herself at odds with the Zhilon’ile Regency and most of my family. Much like my friend Min Lo. “It’s different,” I confide in her. “Different to see it with your own eyes. People are dying trying to get here. Children. Whole families. I have nightmares about it. Every night for a week now. I can’t get what’s happening there out of my mind.”

“Then go back,” she challenges, lightning in her gaze, “and take a stand. Even if you lose everything.” She squeezes my arm affectionately, over the fabric of my uniform this time, where we both know she can’t read me. Then she turns and follows Trystan past the curtain, leaving me behind.

Trystan

“What would you have me do?” Sithendrile asks, her shoppe lined with neat rows of every color of tattoo ink imaginable. I pull off my tunic and sit on the long table before her.

On the wall nearest me, there’s a shelf of metal jewelry of every conceivable style, larger bottles of dye just above it, and bins upon bins of cosmetics and kohl pencils to line the eyes, as is the style here for Noi men.

I think of the little girl screaming in the boat. Screaming in terror when she caught sight of my black hair. My Gardnerian features.

I reach up and fist my short, dark hair. “You can start with this,” I tell her.

Vothendrile

By the time Trystan finally emerges from my great-aunt’s shoppe, my emotions are a turbulent mess from hours of pacing the streets and repeatedly checking for his reemergence. The city is cast in twilight, the purple flower-and-heart decorated runic orbs strung over the streets and lit with a soft violet glow.

Trystan pauses, his eyes finding mine as I push myself off the plum tree I’m leaning against and freeze.

A complete metamorphosis has taken place.

Trystan brazenly holds my gaze as the entire world recedes around us and I pull in a shuddering breath.

His eyes are lined with kohl, the contrast changing their color from deep forest green to a blazing emerald, and the effect is so stunning that a frisson of lightning shivers through my power. There’s something deeply erotic about the look, an edge to it, even though wearing kohl is all the fashion for Noi men and a common style by now.

On Trystan, it’s fiercely compelling.